Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI has just pulled off one of the biggest funding rounds the tech world has ever seen.
xAI today announced it has completed an upsized Series E round, raising a staggering $20 billion — well above its original $15 billion target. The round drew participation from major institutional players, including Valor Equity Partners, Fidelity, Qatar Investment Authority, MGX, and Baron Capital Group, alongside strategic investors Nvidia and Cisco Investments, both of which are deeply tied to xAI’s rapidly expanding compute ambitions.
The funding caps off what xAI described as a breakout year. In 2025 alone, the company scaled its Colossus I and Colossus II data centers into what it now calls the world’s largest AI supercomputers, ending the year with more than one million Nvidia H100 GPU equivalents online. That compute firepower has directly fueled rapid progress across the Grok model lineup, including the Grok 4 series, Grok Voice, and multimodal tools like Grok Imagine. Today, xAI says its reach spans roughly 600 million monthly active users across the Grok app and X.
Looking ahead, the company confirmed that “Grok 5 is currently in training, and we are focused on launching innovative new consumer and enterprise products that harness the power of Grok, Colossus, and 𝕏 to transform how we live, work, and play.” That statement alone hints at just how central Grok is becoming to Musk’s broader ecosystem.
Notably, just hours before the funding news broke, Musk revealed that xAI has purchased five additional 380 MW natural gas turbines from South Korea’s Doosan Enerbility. The first two units are expected to arrive by the end of 2026 and will power an additional AI cluster of more than 600,000 GB200 NVL72-equivalents. In practical terms, this signals xAI’s intent to command one of the largest pools of AI compute horsepower on the planet — a critical advantage as frontier models grow increasingly resource-hungry.
While xAI was previously rumored to be seeking $10 billion at a $200 billion valuation last year, no valuation has been disclosed for this latest round. Still, a $20 billion raise sends a clear message: Musk is going all-in on AI, and xAI is positioning itself as a heavyweight contender alongside the industry’s biggest players.
